Laura Canning's Blog

Antonia Forest

Greetings, all! As I grandly announced last October, my blog, on books and other concerns, is now at my main website: http://www.lauracanning.net/blog.html

But I wanted to share this one here to get it to as wide an audience as possible - A Reader's Guide to Antonia Forest fanfic. There has been some superlative writing done about the Marlow world, and it's worth sharing again. As AF is sadly no longer with us, the reader's fanfic guide should also fill a gap for those who haven't seen a lot of it. Enjoy!

One blog, twice removed

Thanks v much to everyone who's read or been following my blogs. They're now at http://lauracanning.net/blog.html for those who are interested - see you there.

*awaits stampede*

Football, Eimear McBride and a draft very almost done

Coo! It's been quite a while - I blame the World Cup. And also finally - finally - seeing the end to the sequel of Taste the Bright Lights: only 3000 more words to go.

I've also been reading as for a wager: Josephine Tey, several mystery novels (I seem to prefer the Christie/Wodehouse/Tey dry style), more Shakespeare, the spectacularly good and sad Whatever Happened to Billy Parks, and the superb A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by someone I think I have a ladycrush on, Eimear McBride. (Note to the Guardian: her first name is *not* pronounced Eema. Jesus.)

Huge congrats to Eimear and to the fab Galley Beggar Press (I also have a bit of a ladycrush on them) for believing in the book and for insisting it should be heard. It's been both interesting and a tad hilarious watching the flood of interviews and reviews insisting that of course the book is a work of genius - yet it's a book that took ten years even to be published. Kudos to both once more. Galley Beggar publish stories for £1 and send at least one to your inbox every month for a year for £12 - have a look at their publications here: http://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/book-st...

The referred to tickets in my last blog have (halfish) come to pass - I've been to We Will Rock You and they did play Bohemian Rhapsody (and I make no apology for 'singing' loudly into my glowstick); and Iron Maiden is tomorrow. The latest clutch of blogs - on Brittany, surfing and sailing, my advice for celebrities busting up, UK horse shows, a sporty summer, French theme parks and - of course - how to watch the World Cup:

https://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/jul...

https://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/jun...

https://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/may...

https://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/may...

https://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/may...

https://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/jun...

https://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/jun...

Have a great weekend, all,

L

Pandora, I adore ya! I implore ye, don't ignore me!

Sad to hear yesterday that Sue Townsend, writer and creator of Adrian Mole, has died.

Like many teenagers in the 80s, I read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole so much that the copies literally fell apart – and although I’m loath to admit it in public, like Adrian I often didn’t get what the grownups were doing:

Adrian overhearing this conversation between his parents:

Adrian’s mum: George, it’s positive.

Adrian’s dad: Christ, I can’t deal with all that three o’clock in the morning stuff, not at my age.

Adrian’s diary: It sounds like my mother is making unreasonable sexual demands on my father.

Alas, I thought this too. At the time I was too young to know that the phrase ‘It’s positive’ often refers to pregnancy – and I’m just realising it’s slightly disturbing that I did know about ‘unreasonable sexual demands’.

Among my many favourites:
• Adrian wearing red socks to school

• His horny pursuit of Pandora (I would never have thought that teenage boys measured their ‘thing’ but once I read it, it was of course true. [‘Mine is only five inches. Donkey Dawkins says his comes off the end of a ruler.’])

• Sharon Bott who will ‘show it all for 50p and a pound of grapes’ (Ms Bott later says on their first date: ‘Why have you bought me grapes? I’m not poorly.’)

• Bert Baxter, Morning Star reader, and his beetroot sandwiches (and how sweet it is when the family half-exasperatedly end up adopting him). Every time I write about Skegness (more often than you’d think), I remember Bert Baxter saying wistfully, ‘I’d give me right ball for a week in Skeggy.’

• Adrian’s mum’s feminist awakening – which I only realised years later was Greenham Common, or as Adrian called it, ‘a picnic’. Adrian: ‘My mother has gone to a woman’s workshop on assertiveness training... my mother came home and started bossing us around.’

• The poem about Margaret Thatcher – ‘the sort of poem that could bring down the government’ (the first two books will always stand as a document showing what it was like in Thatcher’s Britain for the working class):

Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?
Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep?
Do you weep like a sad willow?
On your Marks and Spencer's pillow?
Are your tears molten steel?
Do you weep?
Do you wake with 'Three Million' on your brain?
Are you sorry that they'll never work again?
When you're dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue?
Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?

• The end of Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction – when comedy does serious, it does it bloody well.

As the Guardian piece showed, Sue Townsend couldn’t read until she was eight, failed the 11+, was married with three kids by 22, and spent years after that as a single mum trying to feed her family on very little. No amount of ‘balsamic vinegar or Prada handbags’ would make her forget what it was like to be poor, she said after she made her fortune, and she made sure to give a helping hand to others. The type of writer I’d like to be – without the three kids, of course.

A necessarily brief – and paraphrased – piece as I don’t have my copies to hand – but am pretty sure I’ll be spending this week catching up. And I’ve just found there’s a Sue Townsend novella I haven’t read – about the teenage diary of a certain Margaret Hilda Roberts…

RIP Sue.

Best Adrian Mole quotes

5 political lessons learned from Adrian Mole

Adrian Mole and me: how this 80s icon mirrored my own politics

Of more summer

Ooh. It’s been an excitedly up and down week for a small Irish writer, who is still wondering why people won't pay same to read Dickens under a duvet; is struggling valiantly on (cheques, praise and general encouragement via PayPal please); and is quite chuffed at buying an entire summer wardrobe at Primark for £40 – even if it’s a size bigger than last year (pffft – they were all happy and memorable dinners).

I’ve been writing this week about literary festivals for kids; here it is:
http://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/apr/...

Live long and prosper.

Summer summer summer

I is back! Illness struck over the past couple of weeks, and while I'm lucky enough to work from home in my writing job, everything else was bumped in favour of staying indoors, reading and cuddling my Build a Bear Dug. Alack and alas indeed.

The Taste the Bright Lights sequel is still crawling along at the pace of an ill and asthmatic snail, but I'm also sketching out a new book, continuing to market/sell Taste the Bright Lights, and plotting a couple of websites that Will Change the World.

And summer is on the way and I went out without a coat today and am eyeing up our roof space again for working on sunny days. (Roof space on the roof, natch, not a term for 'attic'.) Hence, a summer events blog:

http://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/mar/...

Until later - toodle pip!

The one with St Patrick's Day

Irish me did a blog this week about holidays and events in Ireland, in time for St Patrick's Day on Monday.

I've been everywhere I've mentioned in the blog, but I am disproportionately chuffed that Himself has insisted we are going to Galway in July for the Galway Arts Festival. Woohoo! Am out of my head with the excitement. Tedfest in February coming up too.

Here's the blog:

http://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/mar/...

Also: dog-friendly holidays from last week:

http://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/mar/...

And now, Gogglebox.

Birthday chuffedness (yes, that's a word). Plus - book discounts!

Blimey! My Taste the Bright Lights giveaway ended today, and 693 lovely people have requested a copy. 415 readers have added it and 353 now have it on their 'to read' shelves. That's probably small beer compared to some of the giveaways on here, but I am ruddy chuffed - thank you all.

To celebrate, a big discount! The ebook of Taste the Bright Lights is available for £0.99 to everyone who requested it or has added it to any of their shelves. (Perhaps not a 'this looks like a steaming pile of...' shelf.) Drop me a line and I'll send you my PayPal details then a copy (pls note this is likely to be mid-March as I'm what my mum calls 'up to my eyes' at the mo finishing off the sequel).

This week's blog - the wonders of Wales for St David's Day: http://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/feb/...

Thanks again all, and toodle-pip for now!

Of Eastenders and Less Mis

I have been tempted – and told – to resurrect my retired TV blog for some time now, but nowhere has it been more fortuitous than during this week’s Eastenders.

Let me recap the joys and the falls. For the past month or so, there has been a new famlee in the Queen Vic, consisting of Shirley Carter’s relatives. (Naturally, these misfits were never mentioned in all the years Shirl graced/melted our screens, despite her tedious weeks after the Murder of Heather that Ev was her ‘only famlee’, but this is a classic Eastenders trope so can be passed over. For now.)

The Carters consist of Mick played by Danny Dyer, a truly awful actor whose main method of thesp seems to be folding his arms, tilting his head to the side and frowning – whether he is acting menacing about the market closure or being kind to runaway Stacey/Jenny; his dreadful wife Linda, played with cringeworthy accuracy by Kellie Bright, and their offspring Nancy and Johnny. (Both of whom can actually act, particularly the excellent Maddy Hill as Nancy.)

Radio Times and other experts in tellyland tell us repeatedly that this ushers in a new era of Walford – again – yet no-one seems to have spotted that dire Danny is as convincing as Fill Mitchell (aka Tomatohead) as an East End gangsta.

Yet. I was silent until now. But Thursday’s episode, opening with Linda Carter blaring Do You Hear the People Sing (from ‘Less Mis’) crossed a line, as did Danny Dire untunefully referring to ‘the barricades’ the week before. The only musical I have ever liked. I still weep.

However. Once this was blotted from my mind with the brain bleach I normally keep for inadvertent glimpses of The X Factor, matters did improve. Although it makes me wince to write it, Linda then used her fired up revolutionary spirit to lead The People in a protest against the closing of Bridge Street Market – and I may have cheered when Tamwar declared he was ‘not a sheep’, revolutionally dropped his clipboard and joined the protest.

I have possibly watched too much Less Mis, but it is cheerworthy to see soap characters manning barricades of sorts, particularly as this fits with new Eastenders boss Dominic Treadwell-Collins’s assertion that a ‘real’ East End should reflect the new types now living and working there. Shoreditch red-trousered twats, as they’re more commonly known, but the 'East End' has seen traditional markets and shops fall like flies as the area is gentrified, so this may have been an unusual nod to the ‘living in the real world’ gallery.

Unlike the rest of the episode, concerning Kat’s obsessive attempts to ruin the life of fugitive cousin Stacey by blowing her cover and forcing the truth to be revealed to her boyfriend of two years. Like many themes in Eastenders when the Beale fish and chips are down, famlee was used as a plot device weaker than Dire’s acting, either to introduce a new or recurring character, or to cause one to behave in uncharacteristic ways. I am a fan of both Kat and Jessie Wallace’s acting, but really.

The other subplots concerned Massood getting angry again (this should happen more often; sublime acting) and Jane/Ian considering whether they should get back together with Ian/Jane. Ian Beale’s string throughout the decades of attractive, competent and normal women (possibly not Laura) is possibly the most unrealistic Eastenders trope yet. Don’t do it, Jane.

I do despair. Although the latest news in Eastenders development is that the godawful annoying Lucy Beale is to be killed off. This is clearly because Dominic Treadwell-Collins, along with the rest of the Eastenders viewing public, has weighed up the balance of a long-standing character versus the annoyance of her ‘acting’ by folding her arms and scowling, so it must be applauded. Apparently the ‘who killed Lucy' story is to occupy us over the summer months, in the usual long drawn out Eastenders whodunnit tradition. But I shall probably watch.

Although if they bring back Deano… that’s me gone for good.

Previous Eastenders and TV blogs: http://lauracanning.net/journalism.html; scroll down to Eye on the Box.

In Other News this week, I've written about events in France this year for Pitchup (http://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/feb/... published the third edition of Taste the Bright Lights and prepped my press packs in time for London Author Fair on 28 February; managed to properly cook tofu for the first time (I am sad but it was yum); noticed a thigh muscle after a couple of weeks of working out and decided that I really am going to buy a motorbike. I am buying a piggy bank for it and everything.

Of Ron and Hermione, Valentine's Day and Danny Alexander...

Friday again! Been on the boat this week (the Thames is swollen and the boat is a-rockin'), working on the Taste the Bright Lights sequel (90% first draft done, woot etc), blogging for Pitchup.com and showing disproportionate excitement at the start of Chris Lilley's Ja'mie: Public School Girl (she 'used to be Jamie but added the apostrophe in Year 8'). Still not a patch on Summer Heights High, but very chucklesome.

I'm a fan of Vagenda Magazine, and the writers this week used their column in the New Statesman for a slightly scandalous imagining of Ron and Hermione at marriage counselling:

http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/20...

I was consumed with chagrin and my other half was consumed with mirth by the Guardian's highly scientific findings that based on my TV viewing (Black Books, Father Ted, Doctor Who), I am in fact a Liberal Democrat. Whose ideal TV watching companion is Danny Alexander. The other half is a Lib Dem (I'm doing my best) and has let Mr Alexander know. Really. Here's the quiz - approach with caution:

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-rad...

My blog this week for Pitchup on anti-Valentine's Day (one would never guess I'm happily coupled):

http://www.pitchup.com/blog/2014/feb/...

And I'm off to the British Museum tomorrow. Good times.